A few files to get you started on LaTeX

Important copyright notice

The following material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of
information among the students in the classes I teach.
Further distribution of this material is prohibited, and
constitutes a copyright violation.

Notation

Notation is very important in our field.
I have prepared a table of symbols I most frequently use.
You can retrieve the LaTeX source
Notation.tex,
or the PDF file
Notation.pdf
obtained from it.

Typesetting your homeworks

You are required to typeset your work using LaTeX
(pdflatex on our system), the standard
high-quality typesetting program in our field.
Note that a ".tex" file is an ordinary ASCII file,
so you can use your favorite text editing tool
(vi, emacs, etc.) to type it.
When your run pdflatex on it, you will produce
a ".pdf" file that you can visualize or print
(assuming your input was a correct LaTeX file).

To include figures in your homework, you can draw them using TGIF
or any other graphical tool available
to you, and save them as ".eps" files.
Here is an example of how to include a file
Figure.eps, generated from
the TGIF file Figure.obj,
into a file
Figure.tex.

Here is an example of how to use citations in LaTex.
Copy file BibtexExample.tex
and BibtexExample.bib to a
directory of yours, then run the following commands (in that order):pdflatex BibtexExamplebibtex BibtexExamplepdflatex BibtexExamplepdflatex BibtexExample
Note that you need to run LaTeX twice after running BibTeX,
because LaTeX needs to rearrange the crossrefences.
After that, and until you run BibTeX again, you normally only need to run
LaTeX once every time you have modified the ".tex" file and
you want to see what the output looks like.
LaTeX does tell you to rerun it when it thinks that crossreferences
might need to be updated.